


my heart is stitched together (but i still can love you)

by littleghost



Category: James Bond (Craig movies)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Magic, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 08:07:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4821614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/littleghost/pseuds/littleghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>there is magic running through his veins and he thinks of old witches who could change coal into diamond but his babcia always told him<i> magic is not without cost.</i> (what cost was riches from rags, cinderella and her fairy godmother?)</p><p>{or: q has magic and bond would have died a long, long time ago if not for that.}</p>
            </blockquote>





	my heart is stitched together (but i still can love you)

**Author's Note:**

> um ok for the name part  
> emyr means king  
> blaiid is actually worlf in welsh but i switched up whoops
> 
> anyways i wrote this in like 2 hours?? and i think my original ideas were much better, though not as coherent, than this fic. but whatever, i finally finished something go me.

 

babcia names him emyrblyad, king of wolves. when asked why, why this name, she would only smile and say, “his heart is made to tame wolves.” to him, away from those relatives on his father sides who never believed in the magic of his mother, she said, “you are made to tame wolves, and you will live among them but you will never become them.” emyrblyad nods at that, because he is two months old and everything makes sense to him.

at two, he crawls into his babcia’s room and asks for a story. she tells him one, a story of her family’s power, how they used their magic to help others. but there were those that deserved punishment, and magic was a reward just as it was a death sentence. at the end, she told him _magic is not without cost_ because blood and bone and hair and sacrifice was how magic was done. he understood this, and had it carved into his bones because magic ran through his veins and he sometimes felt it when all was silent.

his father dies when he is seven, and his mother freezes during the middle of making dinner and her wooden spoon falls to the floor. it was coated in tomato sauce, and it left splatters that were akin to blood on the floor. babcia walked in, saying words in a language emyrblyad had never learned but understood. she was saying, “it’s okay, you’re okay, you’ll be fine.”

later, babcia tells him of soulmates and lines that connect them and how those with magic have a stronger connection than those without.

 

when he is fifteen, his mother finally stops working, like a machine that decided that it would never do anything again. she would do nothing, say nothing, respond to nothing. that carried on for a week. after a week, when it was silent and his blood began singing a song that was akin to a lullaby emyrblyad’s mother sang when he was a child, he used his magic.

 _magic is not without cost_ ran through his head as he sliced open his wrist and let the blood fall onto a bowl. and he spoke in that language, the one he understood without knowing, and poured his magic out of that wound, eyes squeezed tight and jaw clenched because there was fire up and down his body and he knew that he could never get rid of it.

in the morning, his mother was dead and his babcia told him, “blood is not the worst of it.”

 

seventeen, and emyrblyad’s eyes snap open in the middle of the night. he can’t breathe, and his chest is tight and he understands what babcia spoke about, the magic and lines that connect him and his soulmate and he doesn’t know what he’s doing because he says something.

the pain intensifies but it’s his pain, and only his, and his soulmate is okay. but he is not, and when he finally cries out babcia storms into his room, a hurricane as she checks his arm, broken and when a cut. and glares at him, mean and angry as she spits out, “you idiot!” and curses upon curses.

when he has pain medicine and a cast on his arm (fell down the stairs, they told the doctor), she tells him about those that took their soulmates injuries for their own. but, she said, taking the injury as it was yours is not enough—you have to give the pieces of yourself to your soulmate.

emyrblyad gave and gave and gave because he doesn’t want to end up like his mother.

 

at nineteen, he is on his deathbed because his soulmate, the idiot, keeps getting himself in situations were he gets injured. emyrblyad’s babcia has been a year dead, the wound still fresh and open in his heart. (before he died she told him that his magic was the strongest of them all but he would have to be careful.)

three months ago it was a gunshot to his shoulder. the next week, a stab wound right onto his gut. then a broken femur, a gushing femoral artery. by that point emyrblyad was ready to break the bond from his side, use all the magic he had left to cut that line (because isn’t giving up on your soulmate the hardest sacrifice of all? just to get rid of the pain. he kept pushing forward though, kept going until he was on his deathbed and the was in a vegetative state and stared at the ceiling of the hospital.

he made a miraculous recovery, and emyrblyad wondered if maybe his soulmate finally decided to stop killing himself.

 

when he first works at mi6, it’s more the tech department. there, he’s caught up in office gossip and rumours and speculation about everything. he likes it there, likes the feeling of closeness he can have with everyone and the work that requires nothing but his head.

and then they talk of a double-oh agent that returned from the dead, only thing he had to show of it a scar and burn on his thigh.

(emyrblyad freezes up, because he _knows_ that whoever that is, whoever can return from the dead without anyone wondering about it, is his soulmate.)

 

he gets promoted, quickly, because he’s smart and efficient and never says anything. he’s in q-branch before he knows it, working directly under q himself. the old man says his name like a court to his king, and he wonders about the old man and how he seems to look at emyrblyad with grief in his eyes every time.

and then there’s the explosion and q dies and emyrblyad is the new q and—and q tells himself _nothing is without cost_ and bites his hand hard enough to draw blood when he sees the old q trapped under a pile of rubble, still breathing, still alive, but barely.

“i’m sorry, emyrblyad,” the man says as q speaks in the language of magic. it’s only seconds before the man is dead.

q knows the only reason why it was so little blood was because of the knowledge that he killed a man.

 

he meets 007 after the man comes back from the dead, and q wears several layers and avoids touching his hand when passing the envelopes, case, and radio. babcia always told him about how touching your soulmate brought fire into your veins but q was wary of that feeling. he knew what it felt like to be burned alive, courtesy of his soulmate, and he didn’t want to feel that again.

not when he had work to do.

 

 _not such a clever boy?_ reads the monitor and q knows he’s fucked up, knows it, and he tries to fix it. bond goes chasing after silva and q doesn’t notice when the radio cuts out because he’s been digging his nails into his palms and blood to swelling and he tries to do magic without a sacrifice and he sees the train coming and—

— _magic is not without cost_ and he almost falls over as he has the feeling of falling and rubble hitting his legs and there’s the cost. blood and bones and a piece of himself.

bond goes with m and skyfall is completely off the grid and q has to wait and worry in his flat. he feels intense heat and oxygen deprivation and cold enveloping him every the inside out and when he feels _relief relief sadnesssadnesssadness_ across the line he collapses on his couch and his magic only laughs at him.

he can do nothing for his soulmate.

 

bond comes back broken and ripped at the edges and q tries to put him back together. he doesn’t use his magic for this, because that feels like cheating and q was tired of giving himself away.

so he shared himself like a covalent bond, pressed himself against the ripped edges and suffered the cuts as he tried to mold them into something that didn’t tear at those who touched it.

sometimes bond smiles at him, sad and on the precipice of knowing, but q would just burrow deeper, no longer sharing but gluing himself into place so when bond, when q breaks, the pieces won’t splinter apart.

 

emyrblyad means king of wolves and he remembers babcia saying, “you will tame the wolves, you will live among them but you will never become them.”

and he knows that bond is a wolf, his wolf, and a wolf that will not kill him but instead brings him dead animals because he doesn’t know how to hunt. emyrblyad only laughs when this happens, resting his fingers on the back of james’s hand and the man’s blood sings a song that belongs to the sirens of old.

 

after skyfall there are more missions and q finds himself talking james through more and more of them.

then the mission goes wrong and it’s five against one unarmed man and even trained by the best the odds are stacked against him and q says, loudly, “please alert medical,” and promptly crumples to the floor.

his magic sings loud in his blood and he doesn’t even need to draw blood because there is a bullet travelling to his soulmate’s heart and magic decides one life for another and emyrblyad has learned that while a beast would no anything for its master, a master would do anything for their beast.

 

he learns, when he wakes up, that bond had never left his bedside for the entire two weeks he had been out. medical says it was a heart attack and everyone else goes along with it. q doesn’t know what really happened, but bond is gripping his hand in one hand and tracing his scar with the other.

(and it’s _that_ scar, the scar that is a reminder of the first time he used his magic and how he killed his mother and to him it’s always looked like a deep red.)

and bond whispers to him, when he drifts in and out of consciousness, words of a language emyrblyad never learned but always knew, and james is saying, “i’m okay, i’m okay, don’t worry about me,” and james’s blood is singing and emyrblyad remembers his babcia saying that to his mother—

—and now he knows why his mother withered away. babcia forgot the words to a language ingrained in her bones and magic is not just blood and sacrifice it is love and hope and neither of the women in his life had that.

but james did, and he grounds himself with the words that keep coming out.

 

emyrblyad wakes up in a dream, and babcia is there saying, “your magic is the strongest of ours,” as she whispers words that mean nothing. he wakes up in real life james is laying beside him, tracing scars that were never meant for emyrblyad, ones that were meant for james and they share the scars, because magic is not science.

james says, “my mother told me of witches. she and kincade liked to talk about them over warm cider in front of the fireplace. witches who could heal their one true love, keep them alive.”

emyrblyad’s eyes are wide, but he says, before james can say anything else, “my name is emyrblyad. it means king of wolves. my babcia told me that i would tame wolves, live among them, but i would never become one.”

“good, because i rather like my king,” is what james replies with as he kisses emyrblyad, hard.

 

“blood is not the worst of it,” babcia tells him the morning after he kills his mother. emyrblyad knows this, because there is a cut on his heart that will never heal over and a scar on his wrist that will always remind of what he’s done.

but james will never be something he will regret.

 

 


End file.
